The History of Facebook

Facebook’s forebear was known as Facemash. Facemash was operational from 8th October 2003. The inventor of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg first wrote the software for the Facemash. Zuckerberg thought of something new and started working on a new website from January 2004, that site is now known as the Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg officially launched the site […]

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While it sometimes feels like everyone has a podcast nowadays, the truth is that most Americans still don’t listen to podcasts regularly. The Y Combinator-backed team behind The Podcast App is planning to change that.
And yes, that’s the app’s real name. Co-founder and CEO Martín Siniawski said that no one else claimed it first.
Siniawski argued that most existing podcast apps were built years ago, “when it was a really different medium.” They’re designed for people who already understand what a podcast is, already know which podcasts they’re looking for and already understand what it means to subscribe.
In contrast, Siniawski said The Podcast App is designed to be “extremely fast, extremely easy and extremely reliable and stable.”
How easy? Well, the website boasts that it’s “so simple even your grandma could use it.”
“We’ve invested heavily on making sure that we can onboard people and take them step-by-step in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them,” Siniawski said.
So when you first open up the app, you’re asked to identify your interests, and then you get a list of podcast recommendations. Once you’re looking at a specific podcast, you can browse all or episodes or just the “Best Of” (curated based on The Podcast App’s engagement data), then hit buttons to favorite the show and download individual episodes.
Beyond making the app easy to understand, Siniawski said he’s also focused on helping people find the right podcast for them. Creating good app-wide and podcast-specific search features helps, and so do the Best Of lists, but he said that’s just the beginning.
For one thing, there’s more to be done in search, like indexing the full content of the episodes, not just the titles and descriptions. For another, Siniawski is hoping to take more of a Netflix-style approach to “leverage more and more of that data to provide recommendations.”
The Podcast App has built up a library of 30 million episodes, and includes most of the big names in podcasting. (It also includes TechCrunch podcasts like Original Content and CTRL-T. Just saying.) In the future, Siniawski said he’s hoping to work with podcasters to work on original programming, and to incorporate more types of advertising and subscriptions (the startup currently limits its own monetization to display ads that run in the app).
Oh, and if you’re wondering how Siniawski was able to get such a straightforward (and search-friendly) name for his app, the answer is simple: No one claimed it first.
... Read More

Facebook’s latest public controversy appears to have claimed its first major casualty. According to reporting from the New York Times, the social media giant is poised to part ways with its high profile chief security officer, Alex Stamos. That story suggests that Stamos created friction within Facebook by pushing for an aggressive approach to exploring and disclosing to the public the platform’s role in disseminating Russian state-sponsored disinformation to users. Stamos apparently initiated his exit in December 2017 but was convinced to stay on through August to avoid the hit to public perception, the New York Times reports.
Stamos weighed in over the weekend, arguing that Facebook’s revelations around the Trump campaign-linked data analytics firm did not qualify as a “breach” in the technical sense. The term that generally connotes hacking or a technical compromise of some kind, though the Cambridge Analytica situation involves a since deprecated lax API and a business model that revolves around collecting massive troves of personal data and doling it out in ways often far from transparent to the average user.
I have deleted my Tweets on Cambridge Analytica, not because they were factually incorrect but because I should have done a better job weighing in.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) March 17, 2018
Stamos, who joined the company in June of 2015 after spending nearly year and a half time wrestling with privacy woes at Yahoo, is generally well respected within the security community. According to a story from Reuters in 2016, Stamos reportedly left his position at the top security officer at Yahoo after the company complied with a secret U.S. intelligence directive that allowed the government to search Yahoo user emails via purpose-built software.
Stamos’s presence at Facebook — and his at times candid explanations of the internal workings and reasoning of the often opaque social network — projected the sense that the company was taking user privacy seriously. Depending on what happens next, the security officer’s absence at Facebook is likely to speak volumes too.
... Read More

While it sometimes feels like everyone has a podcast nowadays, the truth is that most Americans still don’t listen to podcasts regularly. The Y Combinator-backed team behind The Podcast App is planning to change that.
And yes, that’s the app’s real name. Co-founder and CEO Martín Siniawski said that no one else claimed it first.
Siniawski argued that most existing podcast apps were built years ago, “when it was a really different medium.” They’re designed for people who already understand what a podcast is, already know which podcasts they’re looking for and already understand what it means to subscribe.
In contrast, Siniawski said The Podcast App is designed to be “extremely fast, extremely easy and extremely reliable and stable.”
How easy? Well, the website boasts that it’s “so simple even your grandma could use it.”
“We’ve invested heavily on making sure that we can onboard people and take them step-by-step in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them,” Siniawski said.
So when you first open up the app, you’re asked to identify your interests, and then you get a list of podcast recommendations. Once you’re looking at a specific podcast, you can browse all or episodes or just the “Best Of” (curated based on The Podcast App’s engagement data), then hit buttons to favorite the show and download individual episodes.
Beyond making the app easy to understand, Siniawski said he’s also focused on helping people find the right podcast for them. Creating good app-wide and podcast-specific search features helps, and so do the Best Of lists, but he said that’s just the beginning.
For one thing, there’s more to be done in search, like indexing the full content of the episodes, not just the titles and descriptions. For another, Siniawski is hoping to take more of a Netflix-style approach to “leverage more and more of that data to provide recommendations.”
The Podcast App has built up a library of 30 million episodes, and includes most of the big names in podcasting. (It also includes TechCrunch podcasts like Original Content and CTRL-T. Just saying.) In the future, Siniawski said he’s hoping to work with podcasters to work on original programming, and to incorporate more types of advertising and subscriptions (the startup currently limits its own monetization to display ads that run in the app).
Oh, and if you’re wondering how Siniawski was able to get such a straightforward (and search-friendly) name for his app, the answer is simple: No one claimed it first.
... Read More

Facebook’s latest public controversy appears to have claimed its first major casualty. According to reporting from the New York Times, the social media giant is poised to part ways with its high profile chief security officer, Alex Stamos. That story suggests that Stamos created friction within Facebook by pushing for an aggressive approach to exploring and disclosing to the public the platform’s role in disseminating Russian state-sponsored disinformation to users. Stamos apparently initiated his exit in December 2017 but was convinced to stay on through August to avoid the hit to public perception, the New York Times reports.
Stamos weighed in over the weekend, arguing that Facebook’s revelations around the Trump campaign-linked data analytics firm did not qualify as a “breach” in the technical sense. The term that generally connotes hacking or a technical compromise of some kind, though the Cambridge Analytica situation involves a since deprecated lax API and a business model that revolves around collecting massive troves of personal data and doling it out in ways often far from transparent to the average user.
I have deleted my Tweets on Cambridge Analytica, not because they were factually incorrect but because I should have done a better job weighing in.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) March 17, 2018
Stamos, who joined the company in June of 2015 after spending nearly year and a half time wrestling with privacy woes at Yahoo, is generally well respected within the security community. According to a story from Reuters in 2016, Stamos reportedly left his position at the top security officer at Yahoo after the company complied with a secret U.S. intelligence directive that allowed the government to search Yahoo user emails via purpose-built software.
Stamos’s presence at Facebook — and his at times candid explanations of the internal workings and reasoning of the often opaque social network — projected the sense that the company was taking user privacy seriously. Depending on what happens next, the security officer’s absence at Facebook is likely to speak volumes too.
... Read More

<p>While it sometimes feels like <a href="https://twitter.com/anthonyha/status/971109380908306432">everyone has a podcast nowadays</a>, the truth is that <a href="http://www.edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Podcast-Consumer-2017.pdf">most Americans still don’t listen to podcasts regularly</a>. The Y Combinator-backed team behind <a href="http://podcastapp.io">The Podcast App</a> is planning to change that.</p>
<p>And yes, that’s the app’s real name. Co-founder and CEO Martín Siniawski said that no one else claimed it first.</p>
<p>Siniawski argued that most existing podcast apps were built years ago, “when it was a really different medium.” They’re designed for people who already understand what a podcast is, already know which podcasts they’re looking for and already understand what it means to subscribe.</p>
<p>In contrast, Siniawski said The Podcast App is designed to be “extremely fast, extremely easy and extremely reliable and stable.”</p>
<p>How easy? Well, the website boasts that it’s “so simple even your grandma could use it.”</p>
<p>“We’ve invested heavily on making sure that we can onboard people and take them step-by-step in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them,” Siniawski said.</p>
<p>So when you first open up the app, you’re asked to identify your interests, and then you get a list of podcast recommendations. Once you’re looking at a specific podcast, you can browse all or episodes or just the “Best Of” (curated based on The Podcast App’s engagement data), then hit buttons to favorite the show and download individual episodes.</p>
<p><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-1609119" src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/apphero.png?w=572" alt="The Podcast App" width="572" height="680" /></p>
<p>Beyond making the app easy to understand, Siniawski said he’s also focused on helping people find the right podcast for them. Creating good app-wide and podcast-specific search features helps, and so do the Best Of lists, but he said that’s just the beginning.</p>
<p>For one thing, there’s more to be done in search, like indexing the full content of the episodes, not just the titles and descriptions. For another, Siniawski is hoping to take more of a Netflix-style approach to “leverage more and more of that data to provide recommendations.”</p>
<p>The Podcast App has built up a library of 30 million episodes, and includes most of the big names in podcasting. (It also includes TechCrunch podcasts like Original Content and CTRL-T. Just saying.) In the future, Siniawski said he’s hoping to work with podcasters to work on original programming, and to incorporate more types of advertising and subscriptions (the startup currently limits its own monetization to display ads that run in the app).</p>
<p>Oh, and if you’re wondering how Siniawski was able to get such a straightforward (and search-friendly) name for his app, the answer is simple: No one claimed it first.</p>
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<p><a class="crunchbase-link" href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/facebook/" target="_blank">Facebook’s <span class="crunchbase-tooltip-indicator"></span></a> <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/16/facebook-suspends-cambridge-analytica-the-data-analysis-firm-that-worked-for-the-trump-campaign/">latest public controversy</a> appears to have claimed its first major casualty. According to reporting from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-alex-stamos.html">the New York Times</a>, the social media giant is poised to part ways with its high profile chief security officer, Alex Stamos. That story suggests that Stamos created friction within Facebook by pushing for an aggressive approach to exploring and disclosing to the public the platform’s role in disseminating Russian state-sponsored disinformation to users. Stamos apparently initiated his exit in December 2017 but was convinced to stay on through August to avoid the hit to public perception, the New York Times reports.</p>
<p>Stamos weighed in over the weekend, arguing that Facebook’s revelations around the Trump campaign-linked data analytics firm did not qualify as a “breach” in the technical sense. The term that generally connotes hacking or a technical compromise of some kind, though the <a class="crunchbase-link" href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/cambridge-analytica/" target="_blank">Cambridge Analytica <span class="crunchbase-tooltip-indicator"></span></a> situation involves a since deprecated lax API and a business model that revolves around collecting massive troves of personal data and doling it out in ways often far from transparent to the average user.</p>
<div class="embed breakout">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr">I have deleted my Tweets on Cambridge Analytica, not because they were factually incorrect but because I should have done a better job weighing in.</p>
<p>— <a class="crunchbase-link" href="https://www.crunchbase.com/person/alex-stamos/" target="_blank">Alex Stamos <span class="crunchbase-tooltip-indicator"></span></a> (@alexstamos) <a href="https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/975069709140877312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 17, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p></div>
<p>Stamos, who joined the company in June of 2015 after spending nearly year and a half time wrestling with <a class="crunchbase-link" href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/privacy/" target="_blank">privacy <span class="crunchbase-tooltip-indicator"></span></a> woes at Yahoo, is generally well respected within the security community. According to a story from <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive/exclusive-yahoo-secretly-scanned-customer-emails-for-u-s-intelligence-sources-idUSKCN1241YT">Reuters in 2016</a>, Stamos reportedly left his position at the top security officer at Yahoo after the company complied with a secret U.S. intelligence directive that allowed the government to search Yahoo user emails via purpose-built software.</p>
<p>Stamos’s presence at Facebook — and his at times candid explanations of the internal workings and reasoning of the often opaque social network — projected the sense that the company was taking user privacy seriously. Depending on what happens next, the security officer’s absence at Facebook is likely to speak volumes too.</p>
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